Book looks at Communist-era secret police penetration of Polish church

Posted: Saturday, March 03, 2007

Ryan LucasThe Associated Press

WARSAW, Poland - A book released Monday has dredged up more painful allegations from Poland's Communist era, naming some 30 Roman Catholic priests, including several bishops, as registered informants with the secret police.

The author, the Rev. Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, was twice brutally beaten by the secret police and is one of the leaders of a drive to expose clergy who supplied information to authorities. The church, he says, must confess and repent to heal wounds.

"The church's avoiding of the problem could lead to irreversible harm," he wrote in an introduction. "Above all, it will cast a shadow on those clergy (and they were the vast majority) who never cooperated with the secret police."

Publication of the book - titled "Priests In The Face Of The Security Services" - coincides with a surge of interest in the issue following the surprise resignation in January of Warsaw Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus.

At what was supposed to be his opulent installation Mass, Wielgus admitted cooperating with security services in the decades before the Communist regime fell in 1989.

Much of the book describes priests who refused to crack under secret service pressure. The last section deals with those who allegedly broke down and agreed to cooperate.

Isakowicz-Zaleski scoured the former secret police archives, stored at the Institute of National Remembrance, and discovered what he said is evidence of police links to 30 priests, including four bishops. Officials at the dioceses whose bishops were identified in the book could not be reached for comment on Monday.

According to the author, the secret police registered Archbishop Juliusz Paetz of Poznan as an informant under the code name "Fero" in March 1978 when he worked at the Vatican.

The authorities broke off contact with Paetz after he returned to Poland in 1983 to become the bishop of Lomza, he adds. Paetz resigned as archbishop of Poznan in 2002 after being accused of making sexual advances to young clerics.

Late Monday, Paetz denied the allegations.

"I did not undertake any form of cooperation with the Communist secret police," Paetz read in a statement on TVN24 television.

Bishop Wiktor Skworc of Tarnow agreed to cooperate with the secret police in 1979 after being caught with a stash of food in the trunk of his car, the book said. The police accused him of black market speculation and threatened to turn his alleged crime into an anti-church campaign.

Skworc reportedly bowed to the blackmail. He was given the code name "Dabrowski" and agreed to pass on information about the attitudes of church officials toward the regime, Isakowicz-Zaleski wrote. Skworc allegedly cooperated until 1989.

Not all of those listed in police files as informants were informants, Isakowicz-Zaleski wrote. Olsztyn Archbishop Wojciech Ziemba never agreed to cooperate, according to the book - and yet the secret police registered him as agent "Wojtek" in March 1979 after he applied for a passport.

For two years, authorities pressured Ziemba to cooperate, but he never agreed. The secret services finally closed his file, "admitting defeat," Isakowicz-Zaleski wrote.